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5 responses to “Enterprise Geeks Podcast – SAP Influencers Summit 09”

Guys, enjoyed part one. That practical discussion of Google Wave in action was useful to hear. Kind of reinforces why I have avoided it so far for the most part, but I want to keep an open mind so thanks for that.

A couple comments on the Summit stuff: I tend to agree with Matthias’ perspective, read by Dan, that the purpose of Microsoft over Adobe for ByD has to do with the SME space and the comfort level with Microsoft tools. Wish I’d thought to ask that during the event, I’m a chump. I’ll try to find out more on this.

Meantime, as far as the ByD interface is concerned, in the room I was in, the dullness of the interface was pretty much a unanimous criticism based on a show of hands in the room. When Howlett asked those who liked the interface to raise their hand, I think there was one – from about 25 or 30 in the room at the demo – who said they liked it.

There’s nothing wrong with the UI, it’s functionally straightforward, but part of the problem is that they had just done two kickass demos of the NetWeaver Business Client UIs coming for All-in-One and B1, so it was a tough act to follow. Later in a smaller group session with a couple members of the ByD team, I got the distinct impression that they had not focused on the UI as much lately to get the multi-tenant stuff resolved. The word from them is that “skins” for the UI are coming, so however folks feel about the UI currently, my guess is that by the time of the GA, there will be several UI options, so the point will probably be moot later this year.

I actually watched the live faceoff between ByD and NetSuite the next day at Sapience, and the consensus there was that the ByD UI was a bit, umm, “old school” in comparison. But heck, these are fixable problems. With multi-tenancy conquered, the ByD team is definitely not intimidated by making a better UI. Maybe they’ll keep the old one as an option, who knows, it could take on a “classic Coke” mystique.

@Kevin Swann – I might actually have slipped up a little bit when I spoke about uPods. I thought they had given a demo of them in the main influencer summit and therefore it was OK to discuss further (I wasn’t actually at the summit myself). However it turns out that demo might have been behind closed doors under NDA. So consider yourself lucky for the little hint that you got in the podcast. 🙂 For now I can say it is a really exciting technology and you can bet that you will hear a lot more about it – just as soon as we can talk about it.